July 2025

Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool

Leave a Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

In recent posts: Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data If you have a look over those posts, you’ll see why you never want to downsize a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 removing the zfs labels from an drive which was part of a zpool which is no longer in use destroying the […]

Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool Read More »

Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data

Leave a Comment / Disks, File Systems, hardware, ZFS / By /

As mentioned in Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD, I have a failing 5TB drive which is going to be replace by a 4TB drive. Only about 1.45TB are used, so there’s plenty of space to grow. If you get one thing from this post, don’t be downsizing zpools like this. I would have had much less work and opportunity for error, if I had returned that 4TB drive

Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data Read More »

x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive

Leave a Comment / Disks, File Systems, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

I was up at 5:30 AM today. I packed the car and headed out. I arrived within the datacenter at about 8:15 or so. By 8:50, I was on IRC and the photos of the FreeBSD racks were uploading. Since I was going there anyway, I did some inventory and disposal work (a decommissioned server, about 25 old HDD, and various bits and pieces). I must say though, I’m not liking this option.

x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Read More »

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD

Leave a Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

As foreshadowed in x8dtu – drive problems, I will be visiting a data center soon to replace a 4TB HDD. The replacement HDD arrived last night. It was unceremoniously tossed onto the front porch by the courier. However, it was properly packaged. I’m sure it’s fine. The original idea: put this drive into a host, and write some data to it, to exercise it a bit. As you will soon learn, that is

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD Read More »

x8dtu – main ssds: how worn are they?

Leave a Comment / hardware, ZFS / By /

Let’s look at these two SSDs (full smartctl output appears at the end). pool: zroot state: ONLINE status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool. The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable. action: Enable all features using ‘zpool upgrade’. Once this is done, the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support the features. See zpool-features(7) for details. scan: scrub repaired

x8dtu – main ssds: how worn are they? Read More »

Scroll to Top